Category Archives: Europe

“You are the first American tourists I have seen in my restaurant this year,” said Aziz, gazing across the vast plaza that stretches between Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet district. Assessing the restaurant from the busy street an hour earlier, we had at first considered moving along to a place more out of the tourism center. […]

Emina was five years old when she was shot in the back by a sniper while making her way around her neighborhood. Doctors operated on her, but the bullet was lodged so close to her heart that it was far riskier to try to remove it than leave it. So she carries the bullet like most of the memories Sarajevo […]

The wind blew a cold breeze across the rows of white grave markers spread across the gentle hillside. At the top of the slope, a marble pillar rose to the sky in memorial of the men and women who gave their lives in Italy during the Allies’ push from Sicily to the north as World War II dragged on. The […]

A red wedding dress hangs in a corner, evidence of a broken heart. A garden gnome with a shattered nose sits on a pedestal as a poignant reminder of a disastrous ending. A rainbow-coloured centipede toy lingers forlornly at the edge of a room, some of its legs ripped off by a frustrated lover. All of these items and many […]

Nearly everything I’ve been taught about writing preaches the necessity of avoiding clichés and overused, tired structures. Originality counts in efforts of the scribe, so it seems wise to shun patterns happily deployed by rheumy-eyed bloggers who blather on with their “Top 10 (enter food product) in the US”, “Top 10 places to (enter activity)” and “Top 10 reasons why […]

In hot pursuit to stock up our apartment with vegetables and fruit, I had drifted to the right side of the cramped aisle in an open air market near the center of Belgrade and was suddenly confronted by human mountain. His scowling visage stopped me cold, with a buzz cut on his square head that disappeared onto his enormous, sloping […]

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